Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO) is increasingly making a pitch that sounds less like a traditional networking company and more like an AI infrastructure heavyweight arguing that the next phase of the AI race will be won by companies that control their own silicon.
Cisco’s Silicon One Push
During Cisco’s earnings call, CEO Chuck Robbins delivered one of the clearest statements yet about how rapidly the AI infrastructure market is changing.
“If you don’t have silicon you’re going to struggle to be relevant to the hyperscalers,” Robbins said while discussing Cisco’s Silicon One platform and recent hyperscaler design wins.
The comment underscores how AI infrastructure is increasingly becoming a vertically integrated business centered around proprietary chips, supply chain control and hyperscaler-scale systems.
Cisco revealed that AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers reached $1.9 billion during the quarter, while fiscal 2026 AI infrastructure orders are now expected to reach roughly $9 billion — more than four times fiscal 2025 levels.
AI Networking And Hyperscaler Demand
Cisco said five of the world’s top hyperscalers each posted triple-digit order growth during the quarter.
The company also disclosed new Silicon One design wins tied to “scale across” AI deployments, a key part of next-generation AI infrastructure architectures.
Robbins described Silicon One as “a massive differentiator” for Cisco, adding that the company’s control over silicon also gives it significantly more control across the supply chain.
“It also gives us a lot more control over the supply chain,” Robbins said.
That positioning increasingly resembles the broader AI infrastructure strategy embraced by companies like Nvidia and Broadcom, where proprietary silicon and tightly managed supply chains have become strategic advantages.
Cisco’s AI Infrastructure Expansion
Cisco also said its Acacia optics business generated more than $1 billion in orders during the quarter.
“The Acacia business is on fire,” Robbins said.
The company believes AI’s rapid expansion is creating massive networking and infrastructure demand beyond just GPUs.
“Traffic across these Networks expected to increase 3x over the next three years because of AI,” Robbins said while discussing enterprise network modernization.
Cisco executives also said customers are increasingly preparing infrastructure for AI inferencing and agentic AI workloads.
“The network is incredibly important and moving the bits around with low latency is super important,” Robbins said.
By the end of the call, Robbins framed Cisco not as a legacy networking company, but as what he called “the critical infrastructure player for this AI era.”
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